Mobile phones with digital cameras are dominating worldwide phone shipments. Total 2014 sales of phone cameras to mobile phone manufacturers for embedding into smartphones and feature phones slightly exceeded 1.5 billion units. According to market statistics and forecasts, by 2018, annual smartphone shipments are expected to grow to 1.87 billion units; around 83% of all phones will be arriving to owners with embedded digital cameras. These shipments will expand the current audience of approximately 6.7 billion mobile subscribers and 4.3 billion unique mobile phone users and will update mobile phones currently used by the subscribers.
Volumes of photographs taken with phone cameras are also growing rapidly. According to Pew Research, photographing with phone cameras is the single most popular activity of smartphone owners and is utilized by 82% of users, compared with 80% for the second most popular activity, texting. Recent studies show that about 27% of all photos have been taken with smartphones. Volumes of photographic images taken with smartphones and posted on social photo sharing sites have already exceeded the cumulative size of photographs taken with any other equipment.
Hundreds of millions of smartphone users are combining their everyday digital lifestyles with paper habits in their business offices and homes. Paper documents continue to play a significant role in the everyday information flow of individuals, households, and especially business users. The role of digitizing and capturing paper based information has increased with the arrival of unified multi-platform content management systems capable of capturing, storing, displaying and modifying information across all user devices, such as the Evernote service and software developed by Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif. Many types of paper documents benefit from being captured digitally and being made available in electronic document formats. These documents include pages from books and magazines, printed newspaper articles, receipts, invoices, checks, tax and other forms, printed reports, business cards, handwritten notes and memos on legal pads, specialized Moleskine® notebooks or on sticky notes or easels, and many other types of printed and handwritten documents.
Modern scanners offer solutions for some of the growing information capturing needs. Thus, unit volumes of mobile scanners are expected to grow from approximately one million to two million in the next five years. However, the mobile lifestyle of workforce and consumers often requires capturing documents or portions thereof under random conditions where users may not have access to an office or home scanner. Additionally, compact document scanners, as well as regular flatbed scanners, may not be able, to provide quality capturing of some types of documents, such as book or magazine pages.
The aforementioned market requirements and usage restrictions are increasingly stimulating a development of smartphone based document capturing solutions, such as remote check deposit software integrated with online banking systems, the Scannable software application for iPhone and iPad by Evernote or by Mobile Capture Solutions for Life by ABBYY Software Ltd. A new breed of document capturing applications includes advanced algorithms for lighting, color and shape corrections, page border detection, contrast optimization, noise removal and other features aimed at creating optimized images of photographed documents nearing scan quality.
Notwithstanding a significant progress in building phone camera scanning applications, this category of document capturing software still faces significant challenges; one of the most important tasks is reproducing legible text and drawings when photographing larger document pages or whiteboards when a single photo from distance conflicts with the camera resolution and leaves text size and other page elements too small and illegible for a user.
Accordingly, it is desirable to be able to provide document capturing with phone cameras that improves legibility of captured text and drawings and possesses an intuitive user interface.